I saw the news a few weeks back that another batch of Miami mayors got booted out, and somehow some new mayors I’ve never heard of are now in charge. And my first reaction, as a local, as a comedian, as someone who has watched this city operate at full speed for years, was, hold on, why are we acting like that’s a good thing? Why are we acting like Miami is supposed to be clean now? That’s not the brand. We’ve been selling something else for forty years. We need to talk about it.
Miami needs corruption. Not a little. A lot. It’s the whole reason the city works.
The brand was built on chaos
Think about it. What made Miami famous? Scarface. Miami Vice. Cocaine Cowboys. Every tourist who flies into MIA isn’t coming here because they wanna see a city council meeting that ran on time and adjourned with a unanimous vote. They’re coming here because somewhere in their brain they think, maybe I’ll see something I shouldn’t see. Maybe I’ll witness something. Maybe my Uber driver will tell me a story that ends with “and then they never found the body.” Tourists want a little danger. We can’t take that away from them.
Imagine flying into Miami and the headlines are boring. The local news is about a new bike lane in Doral. The mayor cut the ribbon on a community garden. The biggest scandal of the week is a parking ticket dispute. People would refund their tickets. They’d land in MIA, see how peaceful everything is, and immediately book a connection to Cartagena.
The economy literally requires it
Half this city’s businesses don’t make sense on paper. You ever drive through a strip mall in Doral and count how many empty boutiques exist next to each other? Each one with a beautiful logo, two outfits on a mannequin, and one employee scrolling on their phone? Those aren’t stores. Those are mood lighting. The rent is two grand a month and the boutique has done eleven dollars in real revenue since opening. The boutique is fine. The boutique is thriving. Don’t worry about the boutique. The boutique has a purpose, and that purpose is not selling clothes.
You take that boutique away and the whole strip mall collapses. The owner of the strip mall stops paying his property tax. The county loses revenue. The mayor doesn’t get reelected. The new mayor comes in and tries to clean things up and now we’re a regular American city like Jacksonville. Nobody wants that. Jacksonville has its own thing, that’s their lane. Miami’s lane is “barely legal, fully thriving.”
The buildings are the receipts
Have you looked at the Brickell skyline lately? Every six months there’s a new tower with a name that sounds like a perfume. Casa Bella. Aston Martin Residences. The Estates at Acqualina. Cipriani Residences. They’re being built faster than the ground can hold them. Some of them have presale prices that don’t make sense for any human salary in Florida. So who’s buying them? Don’t ask. That’s the polite Miami answer. Don’t ask. Just enjoy the skyline.
If we clean up the city, those buyers leave. They go to Dubai. They go to Singapore. They go to Panama. Suddenly the towers are half empty. The construction crews are out of work. Brickell becomes a ghost neighborhood lit only by Cipriani’s neon sign and the occasional Uber dropping off a tourist who thought this was where the party was. That’s a Miami nobody asked for.
The new mayors don’t get it yet
So now we’ve got fresh faces in office. Bright eyed. Wearing real suits. Talking about transparency. Talking about ethics committees. Talking about accountability. I just want to take them aside, gently, and remind them of the assignment. Your job isn’t to clean up Miami. Your job is to keep Miami interesting. Your job is to make sure the New York Times occasionally writes a “what’s happening in Miami” article that includes the phrase “indicted on multiple counts.” Your job is to keep us in the conversation.
If you make us boring, the tourism numbers drop. The bachelorette parties go to Nashville. The crypto bros go back to Austin. The Russian oligarchs go to Antigua. The South American money goes to Lisbon. And we’re left here, in the heat, with no economy and no entertainment, paying ten dollar tolls on the Dolphin and ten dollar tolls on the Palmetto and nine dollars for a cafecito because Starbucks bought out Versailles.
A modest corruption proposal
Here’s my pitch to the new administration. Don’t be lazy with the corruption. Be elegant with it. There’s a craft. The old school Miami politicians understood that. They had style. They had nicknames. They had cigars. They had relationships with people at every level of the food chain. If you’re gonna be corrupt, at least be entertaining about it. Get caught at a steakhouse. Get caught on a yacht. Get caught with a Bentley you couldn’t possibly afford on a public salary. We need the receipts. We need the photos. We need the late night talk show monologue. That’s the gig.
What we don’t need is somebody slowly stealing pencils from the office and not even bothering to get a yacht out of it. That’s an insult. If you’re gonna be corrupt, commit. Buy the boat. Name the boat something funny. Crash the boat into a sandbar in front of a Channel 7 news camera. That’s a Miami politician. That’s the brand.
A city that knows what it is
The best cities in the world know what they are. New York is hustle. LA is fantasy. Vegas is vice. Chicago is wind and steak. Miami is “we don’t ask questions.” That’s our thing. We don’t ask why your boyfriend is a marine biologist with a Lamborghini. We don’t ask why the office building has fifty companies registered to one mailbox. We don’t ask why the new restaurant in Brickell is empty every Tuesday but somehow expanding to a second location. We let the magic happen.
That’s what makes this city the most fun place to live in America. The chaos is a feature. The corruption is the lubricant. The lack of clarity is the charm. Strip that out and Miami becomes Tampa. With all due respect to Tampa, that’s not the move.
So new mayors, if you’re reading this. Welcome aboard. The job is to keep Miami Miami. Don’t overthink it. And if you ever need a comedian to roast the situation in real time, I’ll be on stage somewhere in this city every night this week. Schedule at miamicomedy.com. Mondays and Fridays at Thank You Miami, Tuesdays and Saturdays at Blackbird Ordinary, Thursdays live online. Come laugh while the city does its thing.
